Comment by sholladay

When people say “creator’s intent”, it sounds like a flavor. Like how food comes out of the kitchen before you put toppings on it to make it your own.

But vivid mode (et al) literally loses information. When the TV tries to make everything look vibrant, it’s effectively squishing all of the colors into a smaller color space. You may not be able to even tell two distinct objects apart because everything is similarly bright and vibrant.

Same with audio. The famous “smile” EQ can cause some instruments to disappear, such as woodwinds.

At the end of the day, media is for enjoyment and much of it is subjective, so fine do what you need to do to be happy. But few people would deliberately choose lower resolution (except maybe for nostalgia), which is what a lot of the fancy settings end up doing.

Get a calibration if you can, or use Filmmaker Mode. The latter will make the TV relatively dark, but there’s usually a way to adjust it or copy its settings and then boost the brightness in a Custom mode, which is still a big improvement over default settings from the default mode.